Search notes: Connecting your data into search and services

Microsoft Search is a new cohesive search capability in Microsoft 365 enabling you to find, command, navigate and discover items across your organization’s network of data, transforming your search bar into a resource for collective knowledge. An AI-powered insight engine that connects content across Windows, Office apps, Office.com, SharePoint, OneDrive, and third-party ecosystems to surface relevant, personalized results, whether it’s a recent chat, people card or a document a coworker shared. This allows you to securely and safely get the information you need.

Connectors are a core feature which enable Microsoft Search to connect to integrate with various database, service, and application sources and to push your app’s rich content into Microsoft Search. Connectors help connect your organization’s data and users so they can achieve more.

Microsoft offers a range of approaches so you can build what is most useful to your business scenario, whether you are an end user, administrator or developer. There are several approaches to connecting in the data you need across your ecosystem of applications.

Group Connectors for Microsoft 365

Whether you are tracking a Twitter feed, managing a project with Trello or watching the latest news headlines with Bing—Office 365 Connectors surfaces all the information you care about in the Office 365 Groups shared inbox, so you can easily collaborate with others and interact with the updates as they happen.

Office 365 Connectors are a great way to push your app’s rich content into Microsoft Teams. Any user can connect a team to services like Trello, GitHub, Bing News, or Twitter and get notified of the team’s activity in that service. From tracking a team’s progress in Trello to following important hashtags in Twitter, Office 365 Connectors help your team to stay in sync and get more done.

Building an Office 365 Connector for your application is easy. All you need to do is register your connector in our developer portal, add an integrated configuration experience to your application, and implement your connector. You can make it easy for your users to discover the connector by publishing to our catalog.

In addition, you can use the Microsoft Graph APIs to call Office 365 data for your own applications. The Microsoft Graph provides a unified programmability model that you can use to build apps for organizations and consumers that interact with the data of millions of users. You can use the Microsoft Graph REST APIs to access data in Azure Active Directory, Office 365 services, Enterprise Mobility and Security services, Windows 10 services, Dynamics 365, and more. To learn more see also https://graph.microsoft.com.

Microsoft 365 Administrators

Use Business Connectivity Services for hybrid implementations to crawl, customize, enrich and display external content.

With Business Connectivity Services, you can use SharePoint and Office clients as interfaces to data that doesn’t live in SharePoint itself. Business Connectivity Services can connect to data that is available through a database, a web service, or data that is published as an OData source or many other types of external data. Business Connectivity Services does this through out-of-the box or custom connectors. The connectors, as the name implies, are the communication bridge between SharePoint and the external system that hosts the external data.

Azure Search is a search-as-a-service cloud solution that gives developers APIs and tools for adding a rich search experience over private, heterogenous content in web, mobile, and enterprise applications. Query execution is over a user-defined index.

Add geo-search for “find near me”, language analyzers for non-English full text search, and scoring logic for search rank.

Functionality is exposed through a simple REST APIor.NET SDKthat masks the inherent complexity of information retrieval. In addition to APIs, the Azure portal provides administration and content management support, with tools for prototyping and querying your indexes. Because the service runs in the cloud, infrastructure and availability are managed by Microsoft.

Search Developers

Build fully customizable search applications with Azure Search to index massive amounts of content and add custom enrichment and cognitive search skills, you can incorporate Office 365 data by using the Microsoft Graph APIsas well as a myriad of external data.